Amati, earliest of the great Cremonese luthiers, has been credited with defining the violin's elegant form and setting the standard of superb craftsmanship that likewise characterizes the work of his followers, who included two of his sons and his distinguished grandson Nicolo, as well as Antonio Stradivari. The Museum's collections include several violins by Nicolo Amati and Stradivari, but this much older and rarer instrument beautifully illustrates the Renaissance origin of the violin's familiar form.The maple back and sides are decorated with the Latin couplet "Quo unico propugnaculo stat strabiq[ue] religio" (By this bulwark alone religion stands and will stand). The motto has long been associated with a set of instruments that was thought to have been ordered for the court of Charles IX, possibly by his mother Catherine de' Medici. The back of the instrument is decorated with fleurs-de-lis in the corners, a geometric design with floral ornamentation between the upper bouts, and a few traces in the middle of the back where there is presumed to have been a coat of arms. Similarities between the decoration on the Museum's violin and that on a violetta by Andrea Amati in the collection of the Musée de la Musique in Paris has led to speculation that the violin was part of a set of instruments presented upon the marriage of Philip II of Spain to Elisabeth of Valois in 1559. The decoration found on the violetta in Paris has a more clearly defined coat of arms for the Spanish king, who took the daughter of Catherine de' Medici as his third wife. Still another theory suggests that the instrument was possibly part of a set that could have been made for the marriage of another of Catherine's daughters, Marguerite of Valois, to Henry III of Navarre. Further research is necessary to fully establish the link between Andrea Amati's instruments and the various sets of instruments connected to the French royal court and the children of Catherine de' Medici.

From Cacciatori, Fausto. ed. "Andrea Amati Opera Omnia: Les Violons Du Roi." the following is written regarding the provenance of this violin: "This violin is mentioned in the early account book of the London violin maker and dealer Edward Withers Sr. Withers gives the names of Oliphant and Pellew as owners at an indeterminate period prior to about 1870. In 1873, Sir Louis Mallet, the British Under-Secretary of State for India, sold the violin to Withers, who in the same year sold it to Michael Longridge only to have it returned after a short time. Later in 1873, George Soames (or Somes) acquired it from Withers and possibly it then passed to Edward Heron-Allen, who was listed as the lender at the South Kensington Exhibition held in London in 1885. IN addition to photographically illustrating the violin in his influential and widely disseminated treatise Violin Making As It Was, And Is, Heron-Allen also wrote a series of articles in 1894 for the "Violin Times" of London in which he attempted to treat in a critical manner the subject of Andrea Amati's decorated instruments. By 1890 Sydney Cortauld was the violin's owner and after some unsuccessful appearances on the London auction market it came to the firm of W. E. Hill & Sons. In 1896, the Hills sold it to Miss Hilda Barry, the daughter of the Sir John Wolfe-Barry, the architect of London's Tower Bridge. In 1923 it returned to the Hills, who sold it to the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. of New York. The following year Emil Herrmann acquired it, after which the violin spent short periods in the collections of Dr. Steiner-Schweitzer in Switzerland and Harry Wahl in Finland, before returning to the US to become the property of Robert Dennison, who lent it to the Stradivari Bicentenary Exposition held in Cremona in 1937. Dr. Arverd Kurtz acquired it in 1941 and retained it for more than a half century, and during his ownership the violin again briefly visited Cremona in October, 1982. Through Frederick Oster, the instrument entered the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1999, with funding provided by the Robert Alonzo Lehman bequest."